I think what makes time really fly is boredom. Not necessarily like, waiting for a train or whatever, but more like “I do the same thing every day” exhaustion with life. The past couple of years have flown by for me but it’s 100% because I don’t like my current job and I don’t do a lot else recently. The more I like my 9-5, and the more the rest of my life excites me, the more memories I get and the longer time seems to take to pass.

It’s no surprise that for most people this happens in your late teens/early 20s, you’re meeting new people all the time, you maybe go to university, you go to parties, and so on. If you stop doing that as you get older and don’t start anything else its inevitable that time will just start to get away from you.

I would argue it is either 1) neither necessary nor sufficient, or 2) that it is sufficient but not necessary. Which line depends on whether we are talking about something literally BEING a meme, or something merely having the potential to be a meme.

In the former case - whether something is a meme or not - having text is neither necessary nor sufficient. Adding text to an image does not a meme make, and equally some memes do not have text (or aren’t images at all).

In the latter - whether something could be a meme - adding text is sufficient to provide that potential. It may not be necessary (6-7 for example) but it could be enough.

“I have no memory of this plashe…”

That role was Alan Quartermaine in League of Extraordinary Gentleman. After that movie bombed he retired from acting altogether.

Which is a shame really because I remember it being… Kinda good? Clearly not a work of great art, but fun action silliness. Admittedly I watched it as a kid and never again so who knows really.

Jesus can you actually imagine if LOTR had Sean Connery instead of Ian McKellen? Hideous prospect. No shade to Connery, he’s played some of my favourite characters over the years, but christ that would have been a terrible mistake.

Antisemitism has be co-opted and applied to any and all criticism of Israel, as opposed to it’s previous meaning, hatred of Jews/Judaism. This isn’t strictly because the meaning of the word is being used differently as much as it is that proponents of Israel like to conflate Israel with all of Judaism, or even more broadly with all Jews (as an ethnic group as opposed to a religious one). Since Israel takes any criticism to be hatred, the inevitable consequence is that criticism of Israel becomes antisemitism. I’m splitting hairs here and probably making things more complicated than they need to be… But hopefully you understand what I’m getting at.

Incidentally, even in its more broadly accepted definition “antisemitism” itself is a bit of an etymological oddity, because “Semites”, or the Semitic people, are both Jews, Arabs and others… Judaeophobia is an alternative that is unquestionably specific to Jews/Judaism.

The company I work for (we make scientific instruments mostly) has been pushing hard to get us to use AI literally anywhere we can. Every time you talk to IT about a project they come back with 10 proposals for how to add AI to it. It’s a nightmare.

I got an email from a supplier today that acknowledged that “76% of CFOs believe AI will be a game-changer, [but] 86% say it still hasn’t delivered mean value. Ths issue isn’t the technology-it’s the foundation it’s built on.”

Like, come on, no it isn’t. The technology is not ready for the kind of applications it’s being used for. It makes a half decent search engine alternative, if you’re OK with taking care not to trust every word it says it can be quite good at identifying things from descriptions and finding obscure stuf… But otherwise until the hallucination problem is solved it’s just not ready for large scale use.

I know the topic at hand is not funny but the image of huge, bouncy, floaty syrofoam buildings being dropped rom the air onto Gaza is very funny to me.

“I suffered through it, so now it’s your turn” - some strawman I made up

This seems interesting but I struggle to see how it helps, seems more like its for file sharing. Or is the suggestion that it could form the host side of a web ecosystem, with files for websites hosted in this decentralised way?

Supporting Zionism while being actively antisemitic is a handy way for Nazis to encourage jewish people to segregate themselves. Zionism presents a potentially attractive place to go, and then aggressive antisemitism gives them a reason to leave. The two are not so radically opposed.

It should be, but presently it accumulates in the assets/accounts of the 10 worst people you can imagine instead

I was initially impressed by the ‘reasoning’ features of LLMs, but most recently ChatGPT gave me a response to a question in which it stated five or six possible answers sparated by “oh, but that can’t be right, so it must be…”, and none of them was right lmao. Thought for like 30 seconds to give me a selection of wrong answers!

But for people who those are features, they are very likely to be Muslim or at the least Arabic

Uh, I don’t think so. Perhaps very specifically the religious laws, but besides that you don’t have to look far among westerners to find those for whom…

man’s arrogance, literal slaves, rampant misogyny, homophobia […] one of the hottest places in the world and extremely expensive

… are rather a nice prospect, actually.

The only part I disagree with is stone/pounds for people’s weight. Although we use stone, I’ve never heard someone use pounds… Maybe if you’re in Weight Watchers or something, but otherwise it’d be rounded to the nearest half a stone (e.g. 9 and a half stone)

Seriously cool piece of kit! I have no use for it whatsoever, but can’t help but wish I did.

Spotify knows you’re not REALLY listening to it

I had a “whoa” once, or perhaps something slightly more extreme. The condition wasn’t, particularly - I had a lump on my finger as a kid. The first doctor said it would go away on its own, which it didn’t at all, 2 years later it was much worse and started to hurt, so back we went. The next doctor suggested basically that we just cut it open and see what it was lmao, so that we did. He sliced it with a scalpel there and then, while, me, the doctor, and my dad peered at it.

As soon as the scalpel went in there was a small explosion of goo from in there and both my dad and the doctor recoiled in horror (“whoa!” lol). He proceeded to poke around in the goo hole somewhat with a needle (looking back this seems like an odd way to do things) and fished out a ~inch long hawthorn that had just been in there, chilling for the past 2 years.

Personally I prefer to call myself “fattened”, like a pig I suppose, as this clarifies that it is something that has happened to me, not simply something that I am. It’s not my fault, it’s the mince pies’ fault!

Does it exist in humans, though? I’m fairly certain that it remains pseudoscientific in humans as well as wolves.

Oh, wait, I read point two. I stand corrected.